Expanding the educational toolkit with innovative technology

 Mary Beth Kyer, CMA, champions e-learning programs sensitive to the individual needs of clients

By Robert Colman

Delivering succinct and successful online educational experiences can be a challenge. Companies must decide what can and cannot be taught or reviewed in this medium, and then assure that the ROI from the tool is sufficient to warrant maintaining it. Finding the necessary innovative tool to fit the bill precisely isn’t easy.

Mary Beth Kyer, CMA, makes this comparatively easy for her clients. Kyer is president of Euforea Inc., a Web development company she first started four years ago that sets out to meet the communication and educational needs of its clients in the most effective manner possible. With her management accounting background and first hand experience with the challenges her clients face, she is able to offer them tailored programs to suit their needs — tools that can be expanded as an organization develops, changed with the organization as it innovates.

CMA Ontario was the first organization to test Kyer’s most recent product, called Thinkpass, this past spring. The online platform allows individuals preparing for the CMA entrance exam to practice for the multiple choice section of it with a series of questions that are similar to what they will face in the exam room. There are practice questions that can be used for quick review. There are also timed, full four-hour exam mock-ups. CMA Ontario provided Euforea with the questions ahead of time, and the company designed and built the Web site, which it also hosts.

The system was first piloted in June in preparation for summer exams. About 700 students participated. It was used a second time in preparation for the autumn sitting.

The program is a useful tool to monitor where exam writers are having the most trouble. With the information the province gets from the reporting mechanism within the platform, administrators are able to adjust the types of questions they include in future reviews to assure that students are receiving the most effective review possible. The Thinkpass application is simple enough that organizations can upload their own customized courseware in Excel or Word themselves.

Since the first test, several other provinces have also acquired Euforea’s services.

Meeting needs

Kyer got the entrepreneurship bug at an early age. While still in university, she started a part-time business with her mother, importing Mexican handicrafts.

“Although the business worked very well, it was quite a challenge to manage deliveries,” she says. “We really needed someone on-site in Mexico to handle the orders. That was our biggest difficulty.”

Kyer never lost her desire to develop a really strong business concept. When she graduated from university, she worked for Export Development Canada (EDC) as an underwriter for the forestry industry.

“The EDC encouraged additional training, and it was then that a friend told me about the CMA designation,” recalls Kyer. “I think it was the best thing I could have done for my career and really added to my strategic skill set.”

Her next career move was into the insurance business, working for Aon. It was there that she first got involved in education for insurance brokers.

“I had always been fascinated by communications and found that the education necessary for insurance brokers could really benefit from a better delivery mechanism,” she says. From that need grew the idea for Euforea.

Small staff, broad scope

Within four months of starting her business, Kyer had her first account in the insurance industry. Since then, Euforea has worked with a wide variety of clients in many industries including Workbrain, Royal & SunAlliance, and AIG — the list goes on.

Euforea currently has a team of four, including Kyer. Expansion is likely to occur soon, as deals are cemented with new clients.

“The challenge for us is not being pigeon-holed as a small company with only one specific product,” says Kyer. “With the technical understanding we have, there are a wide variety of products we can create specifically for clients. It may be something we haven’t done before but we have the know-how.”

Among the products Euforea has developed is one called Rolehelp, a support tool created to help salespeople deal with objections while trying to sell a product or add-ons   to a product.

“Depending on your response, the program takes you through a script,” explains Kyer. “You are scored on your progress and you can keep trying until you pass. This is meant to help individuals practice their soft skills.”

The company has also developed communications Web sites that help salespeople prepare for a product launch, clarifying what they should say to clients, how the product fits into the corporate environment, etc.

A natural fit

The nature of a particular online presence obviously depends on the needs of the client. Kyer has at her disposal reporting mechanisms, databases and Web site skills that could all be useful to a company, but only if it suits their purpose.

“Often we’ll sit down with a client and they are unclear about what they want their Web site to be or do,” Kyer notes. “They haven’t thought about how people are going to use the site — as an information site, an online brochure, or an actual educational tool. It’s important for us to speak with different departments in an organization to understand what the takeaways need to be. Once we know what needs to be on the site, we can gradually develop the correct navigational tools so that the experience of the Web site is an intuitive one. We work with graphic artists, instructional designers and the client to make sure that what they want to be seen is displayed properly and prominently.”

This discussion was comparatively easy to have with CMA Ontario. Kyer has worked closely with CMA Ontario and CMA Canada, as an instructor and exam marker, so she has an intimate knowledge of the way its education processes work. It was natural for her to approach the organization when she had partially developed her online testing application to see if they would be interested in being the first to test the system.

“We are always looking for innovative routes through which to support students preparing for the entrance exam,” notes Jon Jones, CMA Ontario’s accreditation manager. “Students are always asking for more questions for review, and we wanted to find a way to deliver those questions efficiently and securely. At the same time, Mary Beth approached us, explaining through screen shots what such a site would look like. So far, the students are using it very well.”

There was some concern at first about the mode of delivery. Because the actual exam isn’t offered online, the society was concerned that this might cause additional problems for students.

“If they study and practice online, and then take a paper test, would this create some confusion? We asked ourselves that,” notes Jones. “But in the end we decided to go forward with it. We have seen that students really benefit from online quizzes in our accelerated program, so this seemed a natural extension of that.”

As noted above, this is a timed test, and students are able to see the correct answers to the questions. “The students are able to determine how they are doing and where they need additional help. This is useful for the student and the association,” Kyer explains.

Although it may seem like Kyer took a big risk coming to CMA Ontario with only the bare bones of a product ready, it fits with her philosophy of product development — don’t build something no one needs.

“It’s best to start with a very basic model and develop that model as you go with the client,” she says. “It all comes back to communication with the client — understanding what they need and addressing that need as effectively as possible.”

As provinces currently using the system continue to add and revise its content as necessary, Kyer won’t be resting. She hopes to increase the program’s functionality and develop capabilities for French applications as well.

Robert Colman is editor of CMA Management.

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